The Paris Wife

small desk in our room, the sharpened pencil lifeless next to his hand, his blue cahier open but empty. He still wasn’t working, and the longer that went on, the harder it would be to start again. He was utterly determined to do it. He would do it. But how?

We played tennis every day in Rapallo and had long lunches with the Pounds in their terraced garden. Another couple arrived to join us on holiday, Mike Strater, a painter friend of Pound’s, and his wife, Maggie. They had a delicious-looking baby girl, with wisps of yellow hair and gray eyes. I liked to watch her exploring the world just beyond her blanket, plucking fistfuls of grass and staring at her hand intently, as if it held the secret to something. Meanwhile, Ernest and Mike ducked and lunged in a boxing match on the nearby flagstones. Aside from being a very good painter, Mike was athletic and game for a good deal, and I could tell Ernest liked him immediately. Mike was a much better physical match for Ernest than Pound, who tried very hard in his blustery way but had a poet’s delicate hands.

February was a changeable time in Italy. Some days were hung with mist, blotting out the hills behind the town until we felt very remote. The palm trees dripped and the swallows hid away somewhere. Sometimes the air was humid and drenched with sun. We could walk in the piazza or along the promenade to see fishermen on the concrete pier, dangling their poles out into the tide. The village was famous for its lace, and I liked to scan the shopwindows looking for the best pieces to send home as gifts while Ernest took long walks into the rocky hillside with Ezra, talking about Italian troubadours and the questionable virtues of automatic writing. Ernest liked to say he didn’t want his mind shut off when he was working because it was the only thing he had going for him. True enough, but when he was through for the day, he couldn’t turn his thoughts off without a glass of whiskey, and occasionally not even then. When he wasn’t writing at all, like now, it was often more than he could take. This was hard to watch and I worried about him.

A week into our stay in Rapallo, I had something new to unsettle me, however. I woke feeling dizzy, with a strange roaring in my head. I tried to eat breakfast but couldn’t stomach it, and returned to bed.

“It must have been the mussels we had last night,” I said to Ernest, and stayed in our room until midday, when the feeling passed.

The next morning, when the same symptoms hit at precisely the same time, I forgave the mussels and began instead to count the days forward and back. We’d arrived in Chamby just before Christmas and a few days after my monthly bleeding. It was now February 10, and I hadn’t had another period. When Ernest left the room to meet Ezra, I found his cache of notebooks and studied the one in particular that could illuminate my situation. Sure enough, for the last year I’d never been late by more than a day or two. This was a week at least, maybe ten days. I felt a small thrill of excitement, but didn’t say anything to Ernest. It wasn’t a certainty yet, and I was too afraid of what he would say.

I couldn’t keep my secret forever, though. I could hardly stand the sight of food and even the smell of whiskey or a cigarette turned me green. Ernest was thankfully content to blame the exotic food, but Shakespear was growing suspicious. One afternoon as we sat at a table in the garden watching Ernest and Mike practicing tennis serves at one another, she looked at me with her head cocked and said, “There’s something different about you these days, isn’t there?”

“It’s my newly revealed cheekbones,” I said. “I’ve lost five pounds.”

“Maybe,” she said thoughtfully, but there was a strange clarity in her look that made me think she’d guessed the truth.

I tried to ignore it and said, “You seem to be reducing, too, my dear. You’re fading away.”

“I know. It’s this business with Olga Rudge,” she said with a sigh.

She’d long since told me about Olga, a concert violinist who’d been Pound’s mistress for more than a year. “What’s happened?” I asked. “Has something changed?”

“Not really. I expect him to be in love with half a dozen women, that’s simply who he is, but this one seems different. The affair’s not waning for one thing. And she’s appearing in the Cantos, well disguised in myth, of course. But I can see her.” She shook her pretty head as if to clear the image. “She’s dug in. I wonder if we’ll ever be free of her now.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said. “But it seems to me you’re awfully tolerant of him. I don’t understand marriage this way at all. I suppose I’m a Puritan.”

She shrugged gracefully. “Mike Strater’s in the middle of something now, too. An actress, I hear.”

“Oh, God. Does Maggie know?”

“Everyone knows. He’s gone off his head.”

“He doesn’t look it.”

“No,” Shakespear said, “but they never do. Men are stoics when it comes to matters of the heart.”

“You seem very stoic to me, too.”

“Yes,” she said. “But I work impossibly hard at it, darling.”

Ezra was famous for his roving affections; I expected nothing less from him. But the news about Mike Strater had thrown me, because he and Maggie looked so solid. I’d been watching and admiring them and their daughter, and stitching a fantasy about how our child-mine and Ernest’s-could squeeze in naturally at ringside and change very little about our lives or Ernest’s work. Now that dream was punctured. This baby was almost certainly coming, but into what?

Marriage could be such deadly terrain. In Paris, you couldn’t really turn around without seeing the result of lovers’ bad decisions. An artist given to sexual excess was almost a cliche, but no one seemed to mind. As long as you were making something good or interesting or sensational, you could have as many lovers as you wanted and ruin them all. What was really unacceptable were bourgeois values, wanting something small and staid and predictable, like one true love, or a child.

Later that afternoon, when we went back to our room at the Hotel Splendide, it began to rain hard and looked as if it wouldn’t ever stop. I stood at the window and watched it, feeling a growing worry.

“Mike Strater’s in love with some actress in Paris,” I said to Ernest from the window. “Did you guess?”

He sat on top of the bedclothes reading W. H. Hudson’s Green Mansions for the hundredth time. He barely looked up. “I don’t think it means anything. Ezra says he’s quite the philanderer.”

“When does it mean something? When everyone finally gets smashed to bits?”

“Is this what’s gotten into you today? It doesn’t concern us in the least.”

“Doesn’t it?”

“Of course not. You don’t catch infidelity like the measles.”

“You like him, though.”

“I do. He’s a good painter. He wants to come by here tomorrow and do my portrait. Yours, too, maybe, so you’d better find a less troubled face by then.” He smiled lightly and went back to his book.

Outside the rain picked up and the wind canted it sideways, so that the boats in the harbor tipped dangerously.

“I’m hungry,” I said.

“Then eat something.” He didn’t look up.

“If it would stop raining, we could eat in the garden on the flagstones.”

“It’s going to rain all day. Just eat something already or be quiet.”

I walked over to the mirror and studied myself impatiently.

“I want to grow my hair out again. I’m tired of looking like a boy.”

“You don’t,” he said to the book. “You’re perfect.”

“A perfect boy. I’m sick of it.”

“You’re just hungry. Have a pear.”

I watched him with his head bent over into his book. He’d been letting his hair grow, and now it was nearly the same length as mine. We had begun to look a bit alike, in fact, just as Ernest said he wished we might, long ago on a star-hung rooftop in Chicago. But we wouldn’t look this way for long. In a few months I would feel and see the roundness at my waist. It was unavoidable.

“If I had long lovely hair, I’d tie it up at my neck and it would be silky and perfect and I wouldn’t care about anything else.”

“Hmmm?” he said. “So do it.”

“I will. I’m going to.”

There was a pair of tiny nail scissors on the bureau under the mirror. On impulse, I took them up and trimmed